Ween might not be dead after all

The last time we heard from Ween, one half of the band’s main creative team was declaring the long-running cult band “a closed chapter”, while the other was countering with “We’ve never broken up. The idea of quitting is just laughable.”

Now, two-and-a-half years after the lights were turned out in Chocolate Town, it seems Boognish disciples might have something to celebrate.

In an interview with a NJ.com, Mickey Melchiondo (aka guitarist-singer Dean Ween) has hinted that, despite the best efforts of his estranged partner Aaron Freeman (singer Gene Ween) to kill things off, the band they formed in high school isn’t totally dead. Melchiondo says the dissolution of Ween wasn't easy, the end of the band coming when Freeman abruptly announcing to Rolling Stone in 2011 that he was leaving the group after 28 years.

“I was really pissed at Aaron,” Melchiondo tells NJ.com.

While the guitarist is careful to note that he hasn’t actually talked to Freeman, he reveals that the lines of communication between the two are starting to open with texts and emails.

In the article, which discusses how Ween wasn’t working and should have taken a break, Melchiondo hints at the band having a future: “If we get back together or when we get back together, I would like to think that we both will want to do it really badly and it won’t be something like money that makes it happen again. Right now, it hasn’t been so long where I don’t remember exactly what it was like and I feel like if we had to do a show tonight, I’m ready for it.”

He also offers the following: “I doubt that in the next month or two you’re going to see us on stage but maybe in the next week or two the process will start, whatever that process is. I have nothing more to say about it because I haven’t talked to Aaron. I can only speak for myself. I feel completely differently about Ween than I did two months ago. And two months before that.”

Ween’s breakup came a year and a bit after what might have been the most insanely brown moment in a band history filled with no shortage of messy nights.

On January 24, 2011 the genre-jumping icons took the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver and then delivered a show that might charitably described as an epic trainwreck.

The night started with Freeman showing up looking like a cross between Beetlejuice and a scarecrow. After an hour-and-a-half of blown lyrics and completely out-of-it behaviour, the rest of the band bailed in disgust. It all came to a sad end with a loaded Freeman standing at centre stage, slurring his way through an out-of-tune “Don’t Sweat It”. The show has since become legendary with the band's fans, those who weren't there wishing they had been.

That may have been the start of Freeman announcing he was pulling the plug on Ween.

In the time since then, he’s hinted that the band was killing him, presumably because he’d spent his entire adult life on the road living a lifestyle revolving heavily around mountains of drugs and rivers of liquor.

The singer has stated that he needed to leave Ween to get clean and sober, something that evidently wasn’t easy to do with fans in the front row each night were losing their shit to songs like the below “Booze Me Up and Get Me High.”